Monthly Archives: January 2016

I can’t remember where this model came from, but when I was rummaging through the Loft Full Of Lead, I thought she would make a good wizard or apprentice for an all female Frostgrave warband.
The rest of the warband still needs painting and will feature some more excellent old Rackham models.

In yet amother Steam Wars game, the British went up against the as yet countryless Navy and their new skimmer ship.

One day I will get the rules posted here, especially now that they are pretty well sorted. Some new situations come up most games, but we have all been playing with toy soldiers for many, many many years, we usually find a nice resolution. I have been trying to keep the main rules to four pages and then have some extra bits for setup and abilities. So far so good.
The theatre of operations was Mr Steinbergs townscape with plenty of buildings for the troops to utilise as cover.

We picked 1000 points again, it seems to be enough units to get a good mix of models and enough on the table for a game lasting a few hours.
The Ironclad Medium tank provides great cover for following infantry.
As usual, there was a three bike unit of LMG Treadbikes, these have so far been in every British force I have fielded.
The Navy had some new artillery to call upon including a heavy canon with a tractor to quickly move it around.
Unarmed transports do not count towards the vehicle limit when constructing a force, this means it is easy enough to include a few extra vehicles to ferry troops around to critical locations.
Above shows the Treadbikes and a Machine Gun equipped armoured car ready to advance.
The Rivet Mortar is an indirect artillery weapon able to sit back and lob shells across a great range.
It did not take long for the first British tank to brew up, although it still makes for great cover for the following troops.
The advancing British Iron Man unit came under attack from Navy infantry but the heavy armour of the British held up well.
Only a few of the British Commando unit made it to the artillery unit and engaged them in melee.
More Navy infantry attacked the Treadbikes but their great speed allowed them to accelerate away from the combat.
The Ramshackle Brass Coffin armed with a Heavy Machine Gun turret provided the Navy with plenty of support fire.
Ironclad vehicles on both sides faced off for quite some time. We really need to pick some other colours for each side!
The Navy do look mighty well turned out in their crisp whites.
The British force called up some air support in the shape of an Armorcast Steam Plane, a Gnatt MK1. This was the first outing for an aircraft in Steam Wars and the flying rules worked well.
The British Rocket Launcher stayed well back in its own deployment zone and rained two indirect blast attacks every turn.
There was plenty of terrain for the infantry to use all the way across the table.

With this and the other games played recently, the rules are just about finished. I had to do a bit of a rewrite to the spreadsheet that calculates the army lists and the guys have been busy updating their army lists!

We had our first go at Black Ops last week. We played a straight forward encounter rather than a stealth mission just to get to grips with the basic movement and combat rules.

The rules are pretty simple, but in places the rulebook could be better laid out. There are a number fo profile errors, with incorrect save values in a couple of places.

The rules contain loads of weapon abreviations that are a bit confusing, I’m not even sure what some of them are. But it looks like the Assault Rifle will be the weapon of choice.

The card activation system is good and adds some randomness to the turn sequence, basically, the main characters are the Aces, heavy weapons are the Kings and the troopers are the Jacks.

None of the model profiles seem overpowered, the leader of a team does not really have any extra game turning abilities other than he can be a bit more difficult to damage.
Close combat seemed a bit under powered, we had several rounds of hand bags with not a lot happening. Stealth kills should be different.
Snipers are quite good fun, especially if they are we positioned in cover, not only are they hard to hit, but their save gets improved as well.
My Sedition Wars models did the job for Black Ops, they fill the role of high tech Special Forces with some serious looking body armour.
We have another planned next week where we will try one of the missions and the stealth rules. It will be good to see how the noise rules work and how unaware sentries gradually twig that something is going on.

One of the models that arrived in the last Meridian Kickstarter was a casualty model sitting on his butt. Not being a big fan of casualty models, I can never really find a use for them, I decided to see if I could make an HMG support model.
The actual gun I think was from a weapons pack for the original Target Games Warzone.
The scope if is from the Curious Constructs/Zinge Industries Kickstarter and the weapon legs are just bits of paper clip.
Although it would have been better of the chap had his arms up, I am actually quite pleased with it.

Although my painting output has reduced somewhat over December and January, I have been busy putting loads of models together ready for painting. The trouble is I now have a large backlog of models waiting to be undercoated. The newest additions are three Ramshackle light tanks with magnetised weapons and hatches.
It is so cold and damp at the moment, I dare not underoat anything in the garage so I will have to wait, with luck the temperature tomorrow is due to be a bit better so you never know!
Basically, I have three piles of models, the first to be sprayed white (the infantry), the second to be sprayed green (the tanks) and the third to be sprayed grey (the trucks and drop pod).
The trucks are some cheap kids toys that I found lying around so I removed the skickers from them and covered with paper to cover the glue remnants.

A few weeks ago, we had another game of Steam Wars in a heavily built up town. Large vehicles were not very useful and it was down to the foot soldier to go from building to building fighting up close.
We used some tiled tiles (!) that are sold as bases for Christmas village dioramas, but they work equally well as a town square.
My British Diver unit was quite effective as they moved to engage with some Teutonic Knight infantry.
There was loads of terrain on the table for this one and most units were benefiting from cover most of the time.
The British Treadbikes were in action again, but with enemy units mostly positioned in buildings, their target opportunities were limited.
Tuetonic Knight Jump Troops were the most mobile of the troops in play, able to use their rocket packs to leap from building to building before swooping down on a British infantry unit.
Even the British Treadbikes found it difficult to move in the narrow confines of the town.